Review of LOST:SMILE memories + promises
| Subject | LOST:SMILE memories + promises LOST:SMILE promises |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 5funnerific on 2021-01-21 |
| Review | Made in Unity, this game is super buggy and slow. It also crashes at the end of two routes if you're on Win7. But that's not all, as often enough you'll have to deal with more generic bugs such as: 1) Missing voice; 2) Voice present but not played automatically, requiring you to do it manually from the backlog; 3) In one scene, a character sounding like they're on the phone despite talking to someone in person; 4) Narration lines being marked with speaker tags, as if it's dialogue. The overall performance of the game leaves a lot to be desired and scenes shift with big delays. NumpadEnter doesn't work. Regular Enter works but does not contribute to skipping the painfully slow scene transitions. LMB helps a little bit but still not enough for a comfortable reading experience and you'll be constantly wishing the game could move faster. OP plays with such immense lag that it's completely unwatchable (another win7 thing maybe?) Well, enough about the technical part. Common route is a chain of mundane events day after day with nothing happening. Every day protag wakes up, walks around for a bit, talks to some people in the hotel he's staying in, soaks in the hot spring, goes to bed. The game has some decent humor every now and then, mainly thanks to Meguru. There are lots and lots of choices so you might want to use a walkthrough, especially since skipping through the game is very slow due to the engine (and amount of choices that pause the skip). Don't expect much plot from this VN. Memories part (base game): Jun route: Pretty decent, in my opinion. True to her name, 純 is pure as they come and extremely energetic and straightforward, which I found somewhat endearing. Her route is about sports and requires you to be familiar with beach volleyball to understand what's going on during the game, as it's all in text and not shown on screen (I've seen some JP players mention this too). Some heartwarming moments and minor surprising twists here. Meguru route: I would the game is at its best here, as Meguru is its best heroine. A bit of a weirdo but an adorable kind, with a pet sheep(?) that the MC for some reason keeps encountering when taking baths in his hotel's open-air hot spring (and ends up using it as a sponge...) A bit of plot here, but not much. Misuzu route: Suddenly lots of plot. Wasn't very interesting though. It's been months since I played this part so I can't describe it well. Promises part ("DLC"): Mihiro route: Short route with almost nothing happening. The heroine has a bit of charm I guess, but that's all there is to this route. Minato route: By far the lowest point of the game. It's a long route focused on a heroine whose entire character consists of getting jealous at every single opportunity for no reason, and "I'm learning to cook so pls try my stuff". She's supposed to be a tsundere and I generally like those, but Minato is really bad at it. Almost all the plot here is about her cooking stuff for protag to try. Her mom though whoa... Secret route: link, also this doesn't really have romance. So somehow all the base game routes ended up being better than "DLC" ones. By the way, the name of the game pretty much only applies to Meguru route and not even the secret one or any others. As you find out in the secret route, this game shares the setting with Seven Days. Evidence 1, 2. I wonder if adding the connection on VNDB would be too much of a spoiler... The absolute highlight of the VN is the gorgeous art style (Jun route early CG), in glorious 1080p. Some of those backgrounds, too. And good BGM (no gallery for it though, and it doesn't seem to be on youtube). And Meguru is nice. But outside of that, it's pretty mediocre. |
| 0 points |
